The Barratt Name Behind It
The old Wood Green factory site closed in 1980 after a long decline, and the place has since been occupied by a creative complex called The Chocolate Factory, which is almost too neat a second life for a former sweet works. Before that chapter, George Osborne Barratt’s youngest son, Albert, served as chairman and managing director from 1911 to 1921 and was later knighted for public services. Further back still, Barratt and Co. was established in London in 1848 by George Osborne Barratt. He began at 32 Shepherdess Walk in Hoxton with one sugar boiler, which is a pleasingly modest start for a name that would end up attached to some of Britain’s most recognisable sweets.
From Hoxton to Wood Green
Barratt’s early business was very much a London confectionery story. George Osborne Barratt had worked in a lawyer’s office and briefly as a pastry cook before setting up in sugar confectionery. In the early years he is said to have delivered and promoted his goods around London by pony and trap, which sounds charming now and was probably just exhausting at the time. The firm outgrew Hoxton and moved to a former piano factory on Mayes Road in Wood Green, with the first building there ready in 1882. By 1906, the company had become a very large manufacturer, making sweets on a scale that would have seemed faintly absurd from the vantage point of that first sugar boiler.
Where the Sherbet Fountain Fits
The Sherbet Fountain appeared in 1925, after other Barratt favourites such as Black Jack and Fruit Salad had arrived in 1920. That matters because it places the Fountain firmly inside the age of the British sweetshop as many people remember it: jars, packets, pocket money, and a level of sugar management that would alarm modern parents. Barratt had long been associated with boiled sweets, toffees, liquorice, sherbet products and other sturdy confectionery categories. The Sherbet Fountain sat beautifully among them because it was not merely something to eat. It was an activity. A slightly messy one, naturally, because British childhood sweets rarely came with much concern for upholstery.
The Modern Packet Name
The Barratt name has travelled through a few hands, as old British confectionery names tend to do. Barratt and Co. was acquired by Bassett’s in 1966, and Bassett’s later became part of Cadbury Schweppes. Since 2008, the Barratt brand has been part of the Tangerine Confectionery portfolio, later Valeo Confectionery, headquartered in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. The Barratt brand name was brought back into active use in 2018. None of that corporate sorting is as emotionally important as the sherbet and liquorice, but it helps explain why a very old London sweet now appears in a modern packet under a familiar revived name.
Why People Still Remember It
Ask a British expat about Sherbet Fountains and you are unlikely to get a calm technical review. You are more likely to get a memory of corner shops, paper rounds, grandparents producing one from somewhere mysterious, or school bags dusted with evidence. It is a sweet with a built-in ritual, and rituals travel well. In Canada, where the weather is bigger and the sweet aisles do not always speak fluent newsagent, a Barratt Sherbet Fountain can feel oddly specific in the best possible way. Fizzy powder, liquorice, mild chaos: The Great British Shop understands that some groceries are remembered as much for the method as the flavour.
